Music Research Group

This cross-disciplinary research group brings together researchers whose work encompasses music or sound in any of its material, aesthetic, social and cultural manifestations

Postgraduates, early career researchers and established academics from any discipline are welcome to join the group, which currently has members from Music, History, American Studies, English Literature, Art History, Film, Dance, Performing Arts, and Computer and Information Sciences.

Members’ research is chronologically broad, stretching from music in medieval Spain to contemporary Britain. Key themes and interests include:

Medieval Song
Music in Early Modern England
Performance Practice and Editing
Black Musicians, and Musical Cultures of Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation
19th- and 20th-Century Opera
20th- and 21st-Century British Composers
Anglo-American Popular Music and the Recording Industry
Material Cultures (including Print, Manuscripts and Instruments)
Music and Medicine/Health/Disability
Music and the City
Music and Politics
Music, Myth and Literature
Sound Studies and Sound Art
Community Music
Art Education and Popular Music

Currently or recently funded research projects by members of the group include

Rachael Durkin's UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship 'Global Music Technologies: Collaboration and Cultural Exchange' (2024-28), Katherine Butler's British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship 'Sing You Now After Me: Catch-Singing and Community in Britain, c.1550-1650' (2024-25), Paul Vickers’s Leverhulme Trust Project ‘A radical new interdisciplinary space for sonification’ and David Smith’s AHRC-funded network ‘Digital directions for collected editions: keyboard music by British musicians before c.1700’.

For further information about the group’s activities, or to be added to its mailing list, please contact the current convenor, Dr Francesca Vella, francesca.vella@northumbria.ac.uk.